I found out about this symposium from Patrick McCray, who is doing some very interesting work on the history of technology at UCSB, and when I contacted the organiser Volker Janssen he very kindly invited me along as a guest to comment (respond) on one of the panels. So just before I leave California and return home to the UK, I'll have this great opportunity to meet with some people doing fascinating work which is closely connected to my own, and also to see something of the famous Huntington Library. Really looking forward to it.
April 25, 2009
All Day Public Symposium Seavers Room, Munger Research Center
Huntington Library, San Marino CA
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in
California and the West
PROGRAM
Coffee and
Welcome Remarks (8:30-9:00am)
I. Engineering Culture (9:00-10:45am)
Bruce Sinclair (Lehigh University) “Engineering Hetch-Hetchy: Nature
and Civil Engineers in early 20th Century California
Amy Bix (Iowa State University) “Millikan’s Monastery: Caltech and the
Tensions of Women’s Technical Minds.”
Patrick McCray (UC, Santa Barbara) “Of Futures and Fringes: California’s
Technological Enthusiasts, 1975-1985.”
Peter Neushul (UC, Santa Barbara) and Peter Westwick (ICW) “Aerospace
and Surfing: Connecting two California Keynotes.”
Comment: Janet Brodie (Claremont Graduate University)
II. How Technology Made Place (11-12:30pm)
Matthew Roth (University of Southern California) “The Public Relations
of Urban Form: The Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 and the Origins of Los
Angeles Car Culture.”
Louise Nelson Dyble (University of Southern California) “Landmarks of
Death: Institutions, Technology, and Golden Gate Bridge Suicides.”
Aristotle Tympas (University of Athens, Greece) “A Deep Tradition of
Computing Technology: Calculating Electrification in the American West.”
Comment: (this will be me, I believe)
Lunch (12:30-1:30pm)
Remarks: Volker Janssen (Huntington-USC Institute on California and the
West) (1:30-1:45pm)
III. How Place Made Technology (1:45-3:30pm)
Carlene Stephens (Smithsonian ) “Time in Place: Is there a California
Style in Aerospace Timekeeping Technologies?”
Stephanie Young (UC Berkeley) "Would Your Answers Spoil My Questions:
Art and Technology at the Rand Corporation, 1968-1971."
Jason Weems (UC Riverside) “Sight Off Scale: Exponential Space and the Lure
of the Limitless in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten.”
Martin Krieger (University of Southern California) “Placing Sound:
Accurate Aural Documentation of L.A. “
Comment: Dan Lewis (Huntington Library)
IV. Transcending the West (3:45-5:15pm)
L. Chase Smith (University of California, San Diego) Technologies of
Leisure in San Diego’s Transpacific Borderlands.”
Michaela Hampf (John F. Kennedy Institut, Freie Universitaet Berlin) “Beacons
of Modernity: Western Lighthouses and Transatlantic Engineering of the 19th
Century.”
Linda Nash (University of Washington, Seattle) “From the Columbia Basin
to the Helmand Valley: American Engineers, ‘global’ technoscience, and U.S.
Imperialism since World War II.”
Comment: Gail Cooper (Lehigh University)
Please RSVP
by April 17 2009 With the Symposium Organizer:
Volker Janssen ([email protected])
Sponsored by: Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
